In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
